'The Show Is Not about Race’': Custom, Screen Culture, and the Black and White Minstrel Show
| Autor: | Christine Grandy |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
Cultural Studies
History media_common.quotation_subject Critical race theory common Face (sociological concept) Innocence 050801 communication & media studies Racism 060104 history Entertainment V146 Modern History 1920-1949 0508 media and communications 0601 history and archaeology media_common V147 Modern History 1950-1999 White (horse) 05 social sciences common.demographic_type Media studies Blackface 06 humanities and the arts P300 Media studies V320 Social History V140 Modern History White British |
| Zdroj: | Journal of British Studies. 59:857-884 |
| ISSN: | 1545-6986 0021-9371 |
| DOI: | 10.1017/jbr.2020.125 |
| Popis: | In 1967, when the BBC was faced with a petition by the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination requesting an end to the televised variety program the Black and White Minstrel Show (1958–1978), producers at the BBC, the press, and audience members collectively argued that the historic presence of minstrelsy in Britain rendered the practice of blacking up harmless. This article uses critical race theory as a useful framework for unpacking defenses that hinged on both the color blindness of white British audiences and the simultaneous existence of wider customs of blacking up within British television and film. I examine a range of “screen culture” from the 1920s to the 1970s, including feature films, home movies, newsreels, and television, that provide evidence of the existence of blackface as a type of racialized custom in British entertainment throughout this period. Efforts by organizations such as the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination, black press publications like Flamingo, and audiences of color to name blacking up and minstrelsy as racist in the late 1960s were met by fierce resistance from majority white audiences and producers, who denied their authority to do so. Concepts of color blindness or “racial innocence” thus become a useful means of examining, first, the wide-ranging existence of blacking-up practices within British screen culture; second, a broad reluctance by producers and the majority of audiences to identify this as racist; and third, the exceptional role that race played in characterizations of white audiences that were otherwise seen as historically fragile and impressionable in the face of screen content. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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